In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.
I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.
...the poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.
From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.
If I had my life to live over, I would never dream
The past is always an invented land.
You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.
Film has changed the way we look at the past.
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.
Many try to force the past to change.
Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.
There are no new facts about the Kennedys, only new attitudes, a literature that, like the automobile industry, puts new bodies on old chassis.
